futile

comparative more futile · superlative most futile

1. Incapable of producing results, useless; doomed not to be successful; not worth attempting.

   He wished he had not been saddled with Whippham's rather futile son as his chaplain.

   1917, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, The Soul of a Bishop

   5 more examples

   But Bathsheba, though she could feel, was not much given to futile dreaming, and her musings under this head were short and entirely confined to the times when Troy’s neglect was more than ordinarily evident.

   1874, Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd. […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: Smith, Elder & Co., […], →OCLC

   He seemed hitherto to have been living by proxy, in a vision, in reflection—to have been an echo, a shadow, a futile attempt;[…]

   1879, Henry James, chapter XXI, in Confidence, London: Chatto & Windus

   No matter how early I came down, I would find him on the veranda, smoking cigarettes, or[…]. And at last I began to realize in my harassed soul that all elusion was futile, and to take such holidays as I could get, when he was off with a girl, in a spirit of thankfulness.

   1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter IV, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC, page 46

   There is an hour or two, after the passengers have embarked, which is disquieting and fussy.[…]Stewards, carrying cabin trunks, swarm in the corridors. Passengers wander restlessly about or hurry, with futile energy, from place to place.

   1915, G[eorge] A. Birmingham [pseudonym; James Owen Hannay], chapter I, in Gossamer, New York, N.Y.: George H. Doran Company, →OCLC

   Goals from Steven Pienaar, Andros Townsend, Jermain Defoe and Harry Kane sealed the win, but Rubin Kazan's 1-1 draw against PAOK Salonika rendered Spurs' efforts futile.

   2011 December 15, Marc Higginson, “Shamrock Rovers 0-4 Tottenham”, in BBC Sport

2. Insignificant; frivolous.

   Of its history little is recorded, and that little futile.

   1853, John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, volume II (The Sea-Stories), London: Smith, Elder, and Co., […], →OCLC, page 120

   1 more example

   This idiosyncrasy is brought out by social pressure, while in a state of nature it might have betrayed itself only in trivial and futile ways, as it does among barbarians.

   1905, George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense (The Life of Reason), volume 1